Opportunity Knocks — Twitter is growing at a phenomenal rate. Active users have increased 900% in a year and even though our web traffic is amazing, we see twice that traffic to the APIs. Interacting with Twitter over SMS is also getting more popular every day.

Twitter Raises $35 Million — Twitter now has the war chest it needs to try building its microblogging service from a geek tool to a mainstream utility. The company has raised $35 million in new financing. — Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced the funding on the company's blog.

Apple Says iPhone Jailbreaking is Illegal — Jailbreaking an iPhone constitutes copyright infringement and a DMCA violation, says Apple in comments filed with the Copyright Office as part of the 2009 DMCA triennial rulemaking. This marks the first formal public statement by Apple about its legal stance on iPhone jailbreaking.

Microsoft splits Zune team in two — Microsoft has quietly reorganized its Zune team, splitting up the hardware and software teams, CNET News has learned. — The software and services portion of the Zune team—the bulk of its staff—will be added to the portfolio of Enrique Rodriguez …

Android Market update: support for priced applications — I'm pleased to announce that Android Market is now accepting priced applications from US and UK developers. Developers from these countries can go to the publisher website at http://market.android.com/publish to upload their application …

It's Alive! — Over the last couple of months, the group working on Mac Chrome (myself included) has shifted gears from layout tests and WebKit compatibility to getting the application user interface up and limping. That also means getting the separate WebCore renderer processes to communicate over IPC to the browser.

First Google Chrome on Mac screenshot appears — Mac users who have been waiting patiently for the arrival of Google Chrome, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. A member of the development team has posted a screenshot of the browser in the Chrome Group.

Search giants join to tidy up Web addresses — The average person likely won't even notice, but Webmasters can rejoice that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have banded together to support an unofficial standard for steering search engines in the right direction.

The Anatomy of a Tweet: Twitter Gets a Style Guide — They're no Strunk and White, but Dom Sagolla and Adam Johnson are aiming to do for Twitter what “The Elements of Style” did for good writing on paper: outline elementary rules of usage, composition and grammar.

Mozilla Bespin tries taking coding to the cloud — Mozilla Labs on Thursday unveiled a new open-source project called Bespin, a Web-based programming environment its developers hope will combine the speed and power of desktop-based development with the collaborative benefits of cloud computing.

Sharing Large Files with iDisk — We're pleased to announce that you can now use your MobileMe iDisk to share files with others simply and easily. Instead of attaching a large document to an email and hoping it's not too big to be received, you can place the file in your iDisk and use the new Share File command in the iDisk web app.

Microsoft sued over charge to downgrade Vista to XP — With one major case challenging Microsoft's Windows marketing practices nearing a make-or-break juncture, another one was filed. A woman sued Microsoft in federal court in Seattle this week claiming that the company abused its monopoly power …

Terabit Ethernet becomes a photonic possibility — Researchers may have found a way to break the terabit-per-second barrier by using a photonic chip made with an unusual material to pull vast amounts of data from a single fiber strand. — Researchers from Australia, Denmark …

700 comments tell the FTC “No DRM!” — The Federal Trade Commission's DRM conference coming up in March has already attracted 700 user comments... nearly all of them negative. Gamers currently appear to be the single most vocal group on the topic. — The Federal Trade Commission wants …

Xoopit for Firefox Integrates Facebook Status Updates with Gmail — It was just a few days ago that Facebook launched new status update APIs. Today, Xoopit is launching an update to its Xoopit for Gmail Firefox add-on that lets users set their status update and view friends' status updates from within Gmail through Facebook Connect.

Pirate Bay trial starts Monday; pirate bus en route — The Pirate Bay goes on trial in Sweden this upcoming Monday, and the site's backers are ready to unleash a media juggernaut of bloggers, Twitterers, and press with the help of a city bus and a live audio stream of the entire trial.